Perhaps people living under totalitarian regimes know better than the rest of us that books matter. In such countries people are not allowed to read any book they desire to read. They can only read the approved books. Those are the books that align well with the interests of those in power. If they want to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn they may not be able to do so. Even in Canada and the United States some people want to control the books that the rest of us read. Such people don’t believe in freedom of expression or the freedom to read. They usually have a “good cause” to justify their intrusions into our reading lives. I am not saying all restrictions are unjustified intrusions. I am only saying we must be vigilant to ensure that only the very rare books justify such an intrusion.
That is why we learn that books really do matter. As Azar Nafisi said,
“…books matter, that they open up a window into a more meaningful life, that they enable us to tolerate complexity and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and conditions are utterly different form our own.”
In unfree states, or in states on the road to unfreedom, such as perhaps the United States is headed, some people want to prevent others from reading anything contrary to the truths they hold dear. In Iran that means no deviance from the form of Islam the regime has approved. In the southern US that means no deviance from the approved belief among the powerful that the US is not a racist country. In some parts of the US, like Florida, among conservatives, that means no books that foster a view of gender and sexuality that fails to conform to the conventional wisdom of evangelical Christians. At least the children should not be allowed to read such books. They do not want others to have fellow feeling for those living lives different from their own.
Huck Finn refused to give obeisance to the conventional wisdom about race. He was the consummate rebel from the conventional wisdom. Nafisi put it well:
Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most memorable of those humble citizens of the imaginary America who stand up to forces great and terrible, but Huck refuses to return home, thus foreshadowing the destinies and shaping the choices of so many other fictional American characters who either leave home, never return, or long to do so. Those homeless protagonists of American fiction become the true guardians of what is best in American individualism, never identifying happiness with wealth or power. Perhaps in no other fiction, in fact, is materialism so frowned upon, or defined as the root of so many evils—an ironic but salutary reminder for a country so blatantly devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power.
Only brave rebels like Huck Finn can resist the lure of that materialism. They make the mistake Bob Dylan warned about namely, “don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” Like Huck Finn who preferred the freedom of life on a raft to the comfortable but “smothery” home.
The members of the Republic of the Imagination are the writers, musicians and artists that are rebels who say no to the smothering ideology of the conventional wisdom. As Azar Nafisi said,
“All writers are strangers, or pariahs, as Hannah Arendt put it. They look at the world through the eyes of the outsider” but only the American writers turn this attribute into a national characteristic…we need to reflect on this constant restlessness, this unending questioning, this battle between the desire for prosperity and success and the urge to walk away from it all, to be wary of complacency—in short to perform the miracle of the small vagabond Huck, who followed his heart as he floated on a raft down the Mississippi.
That was why Huck decide to “light out for the territory” rather than be smothered in comfort. That is why Huck is a charter member of the Republic of the Imagination. But we can all join.
Books matter in the republic of the Imagination; none more so than the classics like Huckleberry Finn.